Brazilian Rice

Before going to Brazil I don’t think I would have paired rice and beans together. I mean, sure there was often Spanish rice and re-fried beans on taco night at home, but beans ON rice wouldn’t have crossed my mind. One of the great things about traveling is that you get to experience new things. Beans and rice is one of those experiences you will want to bring back home.

I was taught visually without measurements but these are approximations should turn out well. Modify them to suit your tastes if it doesn’t turn out how you want.

Ingredients

• 1 cup Long grain rice
• 2 cups water
• 2 tbsp oil (soy oil is typical in Brazil, canola or other vegetable oil works fine)
• 1/4 onion, chopped
• 2 teeth of garlic, crushed or chopped

Instructions

Add the rice, onion, garlic and oil to a wide saucepan and turn the stove to medium heat. Simmer and fry it, stirring frequently until the rice turns white and shiny. At about the same time the onion should be wilted and just barely starting to brown, and the garlic smell should be making you hungry.

Add the water, stir it up once quickly and put a lid on the pan.

Simmer on medium-low until the water is gone. The rice should be soft but not sticky. If it’s too hard add a few tablespoons of water and DO NOT STIR.

Fluff it with a big wooden spoon and serve.

Variations

A popular change is to add vegetables that steam well to the rice while it is cooking (green beans, zucchini, broccoli, chopped carrots, peas). Other changes include adding chicken broth instead of water (or bullion cubes with the water), adding cooked chicken or meat to the rice before or after cooking, or using the rice in fried rice or stir-fry. Enjoy!

The last intentional planting of the day was the herbs. In the right planting area below we planted Basil, Thyme, Oregano and Cilantro. The Basil will eventually take over the whole plot, but that’s OK. We’ll enjoy the other herbs till it does.

The left planter in this picture is part of what I’m calling The Garden of Misfit Seeds. We had a lot of seeds left over this year. Partly since I didn’t know how many to get, and partly because we wanted a variety of plants and seeds came in minimum sized envelopes which were bigger than the size we needed. Not wanting to waste the seeds if possible, I decided that I would squeeze them around the property, even if I had to put them in locations and soil that was less than ideal. Here’s the nickel tour:

The left planter above got extra Rhubarb, Lettuce and Tomato seeds.

This lovely location was the recipient of some unwanted and unplanned chard. It’s planted on the house side of the bush in gravely rocky dirt. I would’ve planted it on the sunny side except that at planting time I hadn’t removed even that much gravel yet! The chard by the way is coming along great so far. The sprouts are strong and getting taller quickly.

This piece here will look familiar, that’s right, it’s the blueberry patch. The dirt where I dumped about 70 pounds of soil acidifies. Which acidifiers by the way, haven’t kicked in all the way…here’s hoping the blueberries survive. I combined all the tomato and peppers seeds into a single envelope and scattered them along the front area of the blueberry patch. The soil is probably too acidic, but maybe they’ll do something worthwhile.

Then of course there’s the extra strip I dug yesterday…that wasn’t in my original plans. I also planted squash and pumpkins around the outside perimeter of the garden fence where the dirt was sandy and loose from having been turned over when I buried the rabbit fencing.

The final destination for our extra misfit seeds is this poor patch of dirt here. There used to be a huge deck on the back of the house, which we ripped out last summer. Under the deck was sandy poor soil. We sodded over the part around the patio, but this big area is still ugly looking. Since we weren’t going to be buying any more soil this year, and since we weren’t going to buy and sod this year, I decided to plant the remainder of our seeds in it. It’s TERRIBLE sandy, rocky soil, especially along the border by the yard.  We had some big envelopes of mixed flower seeds that we didn’t even know where they had come from. I mixed all the flower seeds together, roughed up the back 4 or 5 feet of dirt/gravel with a rake,  scattered the seeds and raked a thin layer of dirt/gravel back over the top.

When we had extra cauliflower and broccoli seeds, those went in front of the flowers, and now pumpkins, Acorn squash and bush beans have filled out the rest of the area out to the edge. I even broke two shovels prying that ugly lump of shrub from the edge so I could keep a straight line with the last beans.

Incidentally the flowers are coming up pretty well as you can see here! The broccoli and cauliflower were breaking through the soil as of Saturday evening too.

I know that the dirt in these locations is not ideal and that the plants probably won’t do as well as they would have in the garden where they belong. I’m hopeful that I’ll get something though, and if not, well, that’s OK too.